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Community

12 Moments of Anime #5: Conspicuity in Cataloging, Sweet Blue Flowers

Aoi Hana was a spectacular show, easily my top pick from the summer season. It inspired a lot of thoughts in me, too, which I recorded in the post that the awkward pun in the title is referring to.

Interestingly, 2009 was pretty much my first experience with the yuri genre, and I think I’ve learned my way around the tropes in the past year. Marimite was good, no doubt about that – the symbolic memes of ribbon-adjusting and “walking slowly is preferred here” define what shoujo-ai is all about. In fact, I don’t think it’s wrong to simply call Marimite a definitive piece, despite the origins of the genre reaching back to the 70s and 80s.

However, there’s no question in my mind that Aoi Hana excels at what other yuri shows only try to do. Much like the demure, subtle atmosphere of Marimite‘s all-girls Catholic school, Aoi Hana tells a straightforward story of first love, touching on devices like love at first sight and the infamous childhood friend. It shies away from the complications of relationships, which would, for lack of a better word, “taint” the purity that people associate with the genre. The aesthetics are perfect, capturing the mood and feel of the show, and the dialogue is only as revealing as it needs to be; but above all, Aoi Hana is sincere. The show is true to itself and true to its viewers. Ryan wrote a good piece on it recently: it’s a story with no excess, and it conveys the bittersweet longing that defines the shoujo-ai genre with the utmost sincerity. For that, it’s earned its place as my favourite yuri anime and one of my favourite shows of the year.

– – –

MyAnimeList is not a new invention. I believe the site was launched some time in 2004, and it’s since attracted as many types of users as there are anime fans. When you factor in the clubs, you can find pretty much anything on MAL. Thoughtful discourse? Check. Embarrassingly narcissistic fanclubs? Check. A society for masturbation? Believe it or not, check.

That said, the core of MAL’s fame is the sheer power that it offers to the user. Did you know that ghostlightning has dropped 18 days worth of anime, or that JP Meyer‘s mean score is about 2 points below mine? I didn’t either, but thanks to MAL, now I do. Unfortunately, no matter how much I preach, nothing can change the fact that MAL is not a new invention.

The updater, however, is.

MAL Updater, the program that automatically updates your list as you watch anime, was apparently created near the end of 2007, but it’s seen constant changes throughout the year. The developers have done a spectacular job of not only making the program work, but making it look good while working. It can be a little buggy, and I’m not sure if it’s Mac-friendly, but the MAL Updater is definitely an attractive program, and it’s an invaluable tool for keeping your list up to date. In addition to doing all of the work for you, it can also serve as a convenient way to record which episode you stopped at, and it has the power to make scoring/tagging and even downloading slightly easier.

Looking at it that way, there aren’t many reasons not to join the community of 10000 and download the program. It’s especially recommended for those of you who are allergic to keeping your lists up to date… and you know who you are.

~ ETERNAL
つづく

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Community

12 Moments of Anime #6: Saya’s Song, Google’s Hegemony

[viola]

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably heard of Nitro+. You probably also played Saya no Uta when it was translated at the beginning of the year.

If you have done those things, then chances are high that your mind will never be the same.

I wrote about the game when I first finished it, but it’s hard to capture the story’s psychological intensity without experiencing it first-hand. Much like Ryukishi07’s When They Cry, Saya’s twisted story is a great example of how to do psychological visual novels right. That said, Saya no Uta does drift more toward horror and fantasy than Umineko‘s mystery, but the end result is the same. For the <10 hours it will last, I would be surprised if the sound of Saya’s song does not leave your spine chilled.

– – –

It’s funny that the word “Google” always brings to mind the blogosphere these days. I have no idea how or when it started, but as some point in the anime blogosphere’s history, someone must have had the bright idea of migrating the community to Google’s services (if I had to guess, my money’s on lelangir). It would be a long, perilous journey, filled with unnamed dangers – but as they say, the grass is always greener on the other side.

(Incidentally, the migration metaphor was pitched to me by someone on Google Wave. Go figure.)

I’m sure the blogosphere has had many places to hang out in the past, be it #animeblogger or a long-forgotten forum. Twitter has also caused quite a stir recently; having a Twitter account is almost as essential as having a blogroll. However, I think the most significant and all-around beneficial change was the migration to Google Reader Shared Items.

GRSI is probably the most asked-about acronym in the community, which isn’t surprising since I don’t think it’s an official acronym to begin with. However, I’m sure the number of GRSI users in the sphere has doubled in the past year, perhaps more, and it feels as if a new “regular” joins every couple months. Without a doubt, GRSI has become the default spot for all sorts of idle chatter, akin to what an IRC channel is supposed to be – a little nonsensical to beginners, but fun for the regulars.

For what it’s worth, I once went to #TLWiki, and Moogy and his friends were talking about fruit roll-ups.

While I have not personally seen a thread on fruit roll-ups (yet), GRSI is definitely the ideal place for anibloggers to hang out and chat. The interface makes it natural to talk about blog posts and internet-related happenings, but it can allow for pretty much whatever you want. Meme-shouting, fangirling, theory-debating – it’s all up to you. The Great Google Migration is easily one of the most important events of the year from the blogosphere’s perspective, and it’s nice to have a place in the vastness of the net to call home.

~ ETERNAL
つづく

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Community

12 Moments of Anime #7: The Golden Witch and the Sun Goddess

[鴉子]

Ah, When They Cry. What would we do without you? We’d all be slightly more sane, probably, but we’d also have missed out on an innovative and suspenseful story that goes beyond the proverbial locked room and doesn’t pull its punches until it’s too late.

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni was a great show, and I’m sure it was seen as unique when it first aired. It’s hard to not feel disconcerted after being treated to a full serving of killer lolis, complete with a bloody hatchet on the side. Along the same lines, Umineko no Naku Koro ni really took off in 2009 with the development of the story in the games released in Japan, the speedy translations of Witch Hunt, and the controversial anime adaptation.

In addition to providing the same mind-bending mysteries and psychological intensity as its predecessor, Umineko also benefits from its setting as an apparently unoriginal murder mystery. The legend of the Golden Witch has the same foreboding atmosphere as Higurashi‘s Oyashiro-sama, but the excitement rises when Battler starts tearing apart the whodunnit tropes one after the other and the audience is left, often literally, at the edge of their seats. There’s no way Ryukishi07’s latest sublimely sinister web of mysteries won’t go down in anime and visual novel history as one of the most innovative and engrossing in its genre.

– – –

As for the Sun Goddess portion of the post title, a certain efficient Amaterasu has been turning heads this year in the VN community. Their first notable achievement is that they work quickly – some of their patches were released before I even knew what they were working on, and NNL openly praised them for their efficiency at some point or the other. Suffice to say, they’ve probably also been producing quality translations otherwise someone would have picked up on it.

However, Amaterasu also had an interesting idea going for a few months where they ran polls to determine which games they should take on next. Of course, we all know how that turned out, but the fact that their reputation as translators grew to the point that their poll would be the talk of the community and the subject of cheating and trolling says something about their rapid ascent to the top. While I do appreciate their initial philosophy of letting the fans decide what gets translated, I also have faith in Ixrec’s judgment and I expect their future projects to live up to their name. The visual novel translation scene is still painfully barren, to the point that games like Love Plus and Muv-Luv often act as an incentive to start learning the language, but it’s groups like this that remind me that the scene is constantly growing, and I’m sure they can keep it up in the coming year.

~ ETERNAL
つづく

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Community

12 Moments of Anime #8: Keionbu and Gakuensuki

[shino]

I hope you didn’t facepalm when you heard the word “keionbu.” If you did, you probably won’t like what I’m about to say.

K-ON was a bit more controversial than most moe shows, and needlessly so. While its premise isn’t anything unique, the over-the-top presentation and glorification of moe was a bit too much for some to handle, forcing it to play the role of either a punching bag or an object of worship. From a meta perspective, it was pretty much a scapegoat for moe haters and fans to attack and praise.

Really, there’s not much to say about the show that everyone on the internet hasn’t already said, but to sum it up, it’s a spectacular example of how to do moe right. I always say that it’s not easy to create the kind of characters who end up with hundreds of posts on Danbooru, despite the superficial appearance of moe characters being a flat set of traits, and I think K-ON proves that. In the eyes of many, including myself, it’s one of the finest examples of pure, fluffy, delicious 2D bliss.

– – –

In other news, back in the summer, lolikitsune released a demo of his meta visual novel, CCY-senpai wa 17sai. The final product is probably still a long way off, but since blogosphere parody/commentary style games aren’t too common (the only other one being Hinano’s RenAi Blogger), it garnered its share of attention.

This is a bit of a pointless reward since the final product won’t be released in 2009, but from the taste I’ve gotten of the game, I can honestly say that I’m looking forward to it. Games like this are usually irrelevant to the people outside of the community, but for the bloggers and readers involved, the experience is like nothing else. Everything from the dialogue to the character designs look great, and there’s even a bit of potential in the story – I still like to think of Gakuensuki as a metaphor for our blogging “careers”, but we’ll see about that. The bottom line is that if you’re an active anime blogger and you haven’t played the demo yet, it would be a NICE IDEA to do so.

~ ETERNAL
つづく

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Community

12 Moments of Anime #9: A Brass Concerto for Visual Novel Fandom

Brass Restoration is what I would call a hidden gem. It’s a game that flew right under the radar, despite being translated by TakaJun of Mirror Moon and Kara no Kyoukai fame. I spent about half a post talking about the game when I first finished it, but I never did talk about the themes or story since it’s fairly self-explanatory.

I think Brass Restoration‘s most distinctive trait is the fact that it’s self-conscious. That might sound like a bad thing, but for a doujin visual novel targeting fans who have already played their Key and Type-Moon and Circus, sometimes it’s more important to be different than good.

Luckily, this one is both of the above. Despite its typical slice-of-life galge appearance, there’s a painful story lurking at its core. Like Fate/stay night, the protagonist’s development is arguably more important than the heroines’ development, and ultimately, love takes a back seat to the psychological crisis that the player must overcome. While the game isn’t meant to be dark, its bitter setting is enough to slowly ease the happy-go-lucky antics of the “trunk” portion into the heavier, more intense and thematically relevant branches. In reality, each of the routes explores the protagonist’s dilemma from a slightly different angle, and they tie together the theme of the value of having a dream. Brass Restoration is no F/SN, but you’d be wrong to dismiss it on account of its traditional appearance. It’s a worthy memory of 2009 because it makes use of its doujin status to tell a surprisingly moving story to even a seasoned audience.

– – –

On a similar note, the visual novel editor and owner of TLWIki, Moogy, has done a few good things for the VN community this year. Well, I suppose he’s been doing good things for the community for a while now, but as far as I know, his editing and translation guides are a new idea.

I’m going out on a limb here, but I assume that most fans of visual novels and anime have some respect for the people who bring them to an English-speaking audience, and many of the community’s more active members take part in the process at some point in their “careers.”

From that perspective, Moogy’s guides are a spectacular help. True, experience is the best way to learn these things, but it’s always helpful to do some background reading in advance. If you want to write a book, you can probably find a million semi-helpful guides online or in bookstores, but how many people write about something as obscure as the VN translation process? Though it might be common sense to the active translators, many VN players have a limited knowledge of the process, and guides like these can be a great stepping stone to help aspiring translators hit the ground running. I’m not sure when I’ll venture into the community myself, but whenever I do, I can only hope that there will be more things like this to ease the learning process.

~ ETERNAL
つづく

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Community

12 Moments of Anime #10: Out with the New, In with the Old… and the New

In 4chan’s words, I’m a newfag. Or a moefag, however you decide to put it. Like many of the /jp/ denizens and unlike many of the most established editorial bloggers, my area of preference – and my specialty – will always be within the modern moe/eroge scene.

However, as we all know, level grinding to increase only one stat well result in a terribly unbalanced character. Unique skills are only useful when they can be backed up by a decent foundation. Knowing this, when I finally finished my initial trek through the world of VN adaptations and my favourites list was more or less solidified, I decided to take a journey through the annals of history – to the days before I was born, to VHS and beyond.

In today’s world, Mobile Suit Gundam is really more of an icon than a TV series or movie. It’s symbolic of a lot of things, relevant to – as they say – everyone’s interests. It can be a symbol of the early days of the real robot subgenre, it can be tangible evidence of the growth of anime as a medium, or it can simply be the spawning ground of memes that have been echoed out-of-context for decades. But either way, there is no question that Gundam is significant – and to tackle Gundam is less like watching a TV show and more like stepping into the infinite world of a ridiculously large MMORPG.

Looking at it that way, Gundam – and similar shows – make up my 10th memory of 2009, from a literal I-witnessed-the-Bright-Slap perspective and a more meta I-see-where-the-oldfags-are-coming-from perspective. Of course, my main focus is still on the general moe/VN/doujin culture, but with a bit of experience under my belt from the decades long past, I can start to understand what mecha fans mean when they debate the intricacies of LoGH and squee at the thought of meeting Tomino. I can’t promise that I’ll finish even half of the old-school anime classics in the next year, but I can say with certainty that my curiosity has been piqued to the point that I won’t automatically dismiss anything made before maid cafes and Megatokyo.

~ ETERNAL
つづく

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Memories of Eternity